Cool Justice: Like sick cattle, students tagged with tracking devices

Just like diseased cattle and other livestock, students throughout the U.S. are being forced to wear ID cards with GPS chips.

The chips monitor the movements of students on campus, tracking them as they go to and from school. They also allow school officials to take attendance without having to interact much with their charges. Sounds like good preparation for jail or slave labor.

What's next: dog leashes? Chips in our bodies?

Unfortunately, citizens cannot expect the federal courts to protect us from these heinous intrusions or other violations of the Bill of Rights. From the early days of our republic to the present, the theory of checks and balances has all too often been nothing more than a theory.

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For example, in 1791 with the enactment of the first 10 amendments, it looked like Congress could make no law "abridging freedom of speech, or of the press." Then, in 1798, Congress passed a law abridging freedom of speech and the press. The Sedition Act was used to imprison writers and speakers for criticizing the government. In World War I, citizens were jailed for distributing leaflets. During World War II, Japanese Americans were put in internment camps. In the 1940s and 1950s, screenwriters and other entertainment professionals were denied employment and / or jailed because of their political beliefs or associations, real or imagined. More recently, federal courts have allowed school districts to pry into the home computers of students and make them wear those ID cards.

Government by its nature does not give us freedom. When citizens take direct and sustained action to demand freedom - as in racial and gender equality - government and business ultimately can be forced to acquiesce.

Why don't students don't have similar rights as adults when confined to institutions that have become more like jails than schools? More than any court ruling, it's because most parents, teachers and school boards find it easier to go along than to take a principled stand.

There is also a lot of money to be made by treating students like sick cattle.

"One day soon," AT&T says in advertising for Radio Frequency Identification Device (RFID) chips, "home room teachers in your local middle and high schools may stop scanning rows of desks and making each student yell out 'Here!' during a morning roll call. Instead, small cards, or tags, carried by each student will transmit a unique serial number via radio signal to an electronic reader near the school door."

A student in Texas, Andrea Hernandez, refused to wear such a device on religious grounds. Hernandez is being punished with a transfer from her science and engineering magnet school.

"This is yet another step to complete government monitoring of our every move," said James Brewer, a civil rights attorney practicing in Simsbury. "Unless folks complain or resist, it goes on and on and on, until one day we will be totally monitored."

Hernandez's school district backed off part way, removing the chip but still requiring the ID. A federal judge declined to intervene on that basis. The family is appealing. However, with the chip removed, this particular case does not look promising.

Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center in Virginia, finds the tracking chip practice on students to be a severe Fourth Amendment violation. LoMonte acknowledges that as a practical matter privacy rights are "relaxed" for students, but asserts this policy renders the Fourth Amendment "catatonic."

"It's a pretty invasive and troubling move for the government to be essentially putting tracking collars onto human beings -- and kids are, after all, human beings," LoMonte said. "We put tracking collars on dolphins and manatees, and sometimes on criminals. That's not the company in which schoolchildren belong, certainly not in the absence of an overwhelmingly compelling justification that I'm not sure has been shown.

"The Supreme Court," he continued, "has shown extreme reluctance to let the government stick tracking devices on people's automobiles even when they're suspected of serious felonies, and if that level of intrusion is constitutionally suspect, then I can't see how putting a tracking device on your body when you're not implicated in any wrongdoing could possibly survive Fourth Amendment scrutiny."

LoMonte make a nice argument, even though his apparent faith in the Supreme Court upholding the Constitution might be misplaced. I like to put my faith in actions by teachers of conscience like the faculty of a Seattle high school that recently refused to administer a district-wide standardized test.

I offer the Seattle refusal as an example of civil disobedience or change from the bottom up. While it's crucial to challenge civil rights violations or stupid practices through court or administrative agencies, that is not always enough to get the job done. What's needed to stop the tracking of students like cattle is a mass of voices saying, "No!" and refusing to go along.

The same principle applies for the mindless, mandated testing that doesn't help Seattle or any other teachers understand how well students are learning. They call it meaningless and a waste of time. It's nice to see some action beyond the talk.

"I just see no use for it all - and so I'm not going to do it," Garfield High School English teacher Kit McCormick told a local public radio station.

Another teacher said the bogus testing should be replaced with portfolios and performance-based assessment.

This is the kind of spirit and direct action that could generate actual constitutional rights and genuine learning for students. Without this kind of resistance and critical thinking, the surveillance and test profiteers will rule the classroom, producing a new generation of docile followers.

Andy Thibault is a contributing editor for Journal Register Co.'s Connecticut publications and the author of Law & Justice In Everyday Life. He formerly served as a commissioner for Connecticut's Freedom of Information Commission. Reach Thibault by email at tntcomm82@cs.com. Follow him on Twitter @cooljustice.